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Jacob Fox, Hardware Editor

This week I was: Hardware nerd by day, philosopher by night, as I hurried to get my Ph.D. thesis completed for its fast-approaching deadline. Oh, and refreshing Amazon pages for some peripherals and other gadgets that I’ve been searching for, still hopeful and still disappointed by the prices of the UK deals.

It took a while but we now have official confirmation of AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3Dthe first AMD V-Cache 3D 9000 series processor. We were told all kinds of things, including the number of cores, clock speed, TDP, and that the processor would sit on its cache rather than put on like a hat.

Oh, and we were told its price: $479. That’s $30 more than the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D was chosen at launch, but it’s not too bad, especially since it will be unlocked for overclocking. It’s mostly “not bad”, however, compared to the Intel Core Ultra 200S Arrow Lake chips.

To put things a little in context, the Intel Core Ultra 9 285Kthe flagship processor in Intel’s Arrow Lake line, costs $589, over $100 more than the upcoming 9800X3D. The 9800X3D’s price seals the deal, as far as I’m concerned: Intel’s latest chips just don’t provide enough value for gaming. Which is a real mistake when you think about it, given that AMD’s Zen 5 launch was hardly spectacular.

The 285K’s price wouldn’t be such a disaster if it were top-performing (Intel’s previous-generation flagships cost more than the 7800X3D, after all), but that’s not the case. In Nick’s testing, he found that it lagged behind the competition in many apps and games (although it had low power consumption). Not only does it lose to AMD’s current-generation high-end processors, it trades blows with previous-generation Intel ones.

$589 seems like a lot of money for a whole bunch of nothing special.

It even performs on par or worse than the Ryzen 5 7600X in gaming, and the latter is currently on the rise. $208 at Amazon. No one will buy the 285K for gaming, and given the Ultra 5 245K core costs $309 and is obviously even less capable than the 285K, no one will accept it for gaming either.

Ditto for the $395 Core Ultra 7 265K, which arguably fares a little better on the value front, but still doesn’t hold up to AMD’s previous generation offerings like the 7700X and 7800X3D .

Today, AMD announced that we’re about to get a next-generation X3D chip for less than $500, capable of being overclocked and boasting higher clock speeds than the 7800X3D to boot. As far as the game is concerned, this looks like a death blow for Arrow Lake. That depends, however, on whether AMD’s chip is as good as it looks on paper.

And yes, the 7800X3D can seem expensive next to the AMD Ryzen 7 9700Xwhich currently lasts approximately $312 at Newegg (with promo code BFDDYA55)but there has always been an extra charge for 3D V-Cache chips. And in any case, this only strengthens the 9000 series compared to the Core Ultra 200S series.

Add to that the non-X3D prices of the 9000 series and there’s little room left for Arrow Lake, certainly not for gaming. Sure, they’re low-power: that’s a real boon for Intel’s Lunar Lake mobile processors, but not so much for Arrow Lake’s, since people care less about squeezing every ounce of efficiency out of a desktop processor.

Now add the 9800X3D to the mix as well, priced over $100 cheaper than the 285K, and Arrow Lake starts to look a little ridiculous.

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Especially considering that upgrading means changing your entire rig to use a new socket, while at least some gamers will already be using an AM5 motherboard compatible with the 9000 series. And even If you’re not already using an AM5 card, you can get one for cheap. The cheapest LGA 1851 motherboard I could find on Amazon, for example, is $180but you can get an AM5 card for as little as $70 at Amazon.

If the 9800X3D can stay significantly cheaper than Intel’s mediocre flagship and do so with tons of cache for what will certainly be some pretty impressive gaming performance, and has a cheaper platform cost to boot, than are we supposed to conclude about Arrow Lake and its price point?

It’s hard to get excited about such mediocre CPUs for gaming, especially in light of AMD’s newer, cheaper, and potentially faster options. Given the somewhat disappointing generation-to-generation improvements starting with the 9000 series – “Zen 5%”, anyone? – the fact that it looks much more attractive than Arrow Lake really says something against Intel chips.

The only way the Core Ultra 200S line will be a reasonable option for PC gamers is if they get price cuts. And they will have to be quite important, too.